Why is joplin famous

He also took lessons from a German-born music teacher named Julius Weiss. His father played the violin, and his mother sang and played the banjo. Joplin began performing as a musician when he was a teenager. In addition to the piano, Joplin played the violin and cornet. He also sang well. Sometime in the s, Joplin left Texarkana and traveled to many places. He also went to St. Louis where he met Tom Turpin , another ragtime musician. Joplin played a variety of music, combining traditional western forms such as the waltz and march with melodies and rhythms borrowed from African American songs.

He led and played the cornet in a band that played outside the fairgrounds. There he met musician Otis Saunders, who encouraged him to write down and publish the songs he had been making up as he entertained his audiences.

Scott Joplin moved to Sedalia, a busy railroad town in Missouri, in Using Sedalia as a home base, he continued to travel around the country with various musical groups. In he enrolled at the George R. Smith College to study music seriously and to develop the skill of transferring musical sounds into notes recorded on a page that other musicians could then play.

Joplin quickly learned how to write down the vibrant melodies and complex rhythms he and his fellow musicians had been developing. He then published several original compositions and also started co-writing songs with Sedalia musicians Arthur Marshall and Scott Hayden.

Scott Joplin soon became a popular and respected musician in Sedalia. It became a classic model of ragtime music and thrust Joplin into the national spotlight. Louis in John Stark had already moved there, and Hayden and Marshall came, too. Joplin and his friends hoped to become successful performers and composers in this urban center. With their presence, St. Louis became a focal point for this special kind of music.

Joplin devoted most of his time and energy to composing new pieces and teaching music lessons. He wrote and published many new works, including an opera and ballet, while living in St. His ragtime compositions gained the attention of classically trained musicians and critics.

Alfred Ernst, conductor of the St. By , Joplin had settled in New York to work on securing funding for another opera he had created, Treemonisha , a multi-genre theatrical project which told the story of a rural African-American community near Texarkana.

A precursor to George Gershwin's Porgy and Bess , Treemonish a was presented in as a scaled-down production with voice and piano, but would not receive a full-stage treatment for years to come. Joplin continued to work on various musical forms and formed his own publishing company with his third wife, Lottie, in By , he had started to succumb to the ravages of syphilis, which he was thought to have contracted years earlier, and was later hospitalized and institutionalized.

Joplin died on April 1, Ragtime would enjoy a resurgence during the s, and then in the '70s became a hugely popular classical genre that also entered the U. Joplin's Treemonisha was also fully staged in on Broadway. The following year, Joplin received a special posthumous Pulitzer Prize, honoring the man who shaped a genre that influenced decades of music. We strive for accuracy and fairness. If you see something that doesn't look right, contact us!

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Create an Account - Increase your productivity, customize your experience, and engage in information you care about. Skip to Main Content. Loading Close. Louis about A type of music known as "jig-piano" was popular there, and the bouncing bass and syncopated melody lines were later referred to as "ragged time," or simply "ragtime. In he enrolled in Sedalia's George R.

Smith College for Negroes, studying piano and theory. During this time he was an "entertainer" at the Maple Leaf Club and traveled to Kansas City, where in Carl Hoffman issued Joplin's first ragtime publications, including his best-known piece, "Maple Leaf Rag".

The sheet music went on to sell over one million copies. Thereafter Joplin entered into an on-and-off arrangement with John Stark, a publisher in Sedalia, but later in St. Louis and New York.

In addition to his output of increasingly sophisticated individual rags, Joplin began to integrate ragtime idioms into works in the larger musical forms: a ballet, "The Ragtime Dance" , and two operas, "The Guest of Honor" and "Treemonisha"